Why Everything Now Feels So Hard to Think About

What a kindergarten classroom revealed about speed, screens, and certainty

I recently spent time in a kindergarten classroom.

Students were working independently on a reading program on iPads. While the devices were out, engagement was high, and the classroom was quiet. Then the teacher gave the instruction: Put the iPads away.

Several students resisted returning the devices. One student became physical. Another screamed, and another student cried. The focus and engagement disappeared. This wasn’t subtle, and it certainly was not surprising.

What mattered wasn’t that children liked iPads, but how efficiently their behavior had been shaped to expect immediate feedback and completion, and how quickly things unraveled when that system disappeared.

The Same Mistake, Just Earlier

We created learning environments where moving quickly is rewarded long before students are asked to sit with anything that feels hard.

In kindergarten, it shows up in how quickly engagement rises and how quickly it falls. Later, it shows up as labeling, reacting, and moving on.

Different ages, same pattern. What I saw in that classroom felt like the early version of a problem that shows up everywhere now: the growing difficulty of staying with things that don’t resolve immediately.

To explain, the following section breaks down how this pattern evolves across development, and why the stakes extend beyond kindergarten.